How to Rename Friends in Elgg 1.8

Some of our Elgg users were looking for an easy way to rename the entire ‘friends’ plugin to something else, like ‘colleagues’, ‘contacts’, ‘classmates’, etc. Instead of directly modifying any code, in this article I will give you a step by step guide on how to rename friends to anything you want in Elgg 1.8

1. First, we will download a plugin called “Rename Friends 1.8.x for Elgg 1.8”, which can be downloaded here: Rename Friends

2. After downloading the plugin, upload the plugin to the mod folder. If you don’t know how to do that, please read this article

3. Login on your Elgg network as an Admin and go to the Administration Dashboard:

4. Then go to menu “Configure ->Plugins” and activate the plugin:

5. After activating the plugin, we click on “Settings”:

6. As an example, we will change “Friends” to “Contacts”. Remember, it asks twice: One for singular and the plural of the word you choose:

7. To apply the renaming, click on save. You will get a notification if the change was successful or not:

On previous Elgg versions, doing this renaming was difficult. Several emailed me that they messed up their site by trying to do this by modifying several files. However, in Elgg 1.8 this can be done easily without worrying that you are going to break your site.